The War On Weeds

When are you gonna get rid of those weeds, my father would ask every time he visited my Vermont lawn. Splotched with purple thyme, yellow dandelions and white clovers, the lawn attracted honeybees and, later in the season, fireflies. He and I saw the same plants, but we had learned to see differently. Where my father saw interlopers, I saw residents.

For most of my childhood, my father was at war on his quarter-acre plot, my childhood backyard. In some of my most vivid memories, he struggles with the lawnmower, sweat beading on his arm hair. He curses the crabgrass, he drenches dandelions and clovers with chemicals from white spray bottles he got at the hardware store down the street. It was an endless battle.

My father was a Vietnam veteran and a lifelong Republican. He liked to say that women belong in the kitchen. I had become an environmental studies professor, a member of the East Coast liberal elite, a daughter he was ashamed to introduce to his friends at the Post.

He died a few years ago of multiple myeloma, a brutal cancer that riddled his bones with holes. Until the end, he was convinced that being exposed to Agent Orange in Vietnam had caused the disease. He had lived half a century longer than many of the young men he’d served with, and he felt ashamed, I think, of the extra time.

In the weeks after his death, I looked up the logbooks of his aircraft carrier, hoping to piece together whether he would have been exposed to Agent Orange in Vietnam. I later realized he’d been exposed to it in our backyard.